The Beaufort Sisters. Jon Cleary
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to get by, mainly because their wants and ambitions had been small. His father had been a suburban solicitor who had been more than content with his house in Ealing with a modest mortgage on it, the second-hand Wolseley car and membership of the local tennis club. Wealth, real riches, was something the family never thought about, as they never thought about the families who had the wealth, the Grosvenors, the Cavendishes, the Howards. Perhaps it had something to do with the English system: he might have been different had he been an American. Ambition, even envy, was not considered off-side in this country. He was handicapped by his upbringing, by a mother and father who had, without ever mentioning the subject, taught him to be satisfied with his lot. But these days he felt like a man who, accustomed to everyday sunsets, was all at once confronted with the pyrotechnics of Judgement Day. It was an image he never confided to Nina. Something else he also never confessed to her, and only reluctantly to himself, was that he was afraid of the seduction of money. Since coming here to Kansas City he had realized he had a weakness he had never suspected in himself: if he had enough money of his own he would be nothing but a hedonist. That was the ultimate and real reason for not taking the Beaufort riches for granted. It was not something he could explain to Edith.
He handed Edith over to Lucas, collected Nina and took her into the buffet supper. ‘It’s a marvellous success, darling. We should do this more often.’
‘You’re really enjoying yourself? Truly?’
‘Darling heart – ’ He kissed her cheek. ‘Truly.’
8
The stockyards’ strike began on the day the Paris conference on the newly announced Marshall Plan opened.
‘Truman should be running this country,’ said Lucas, ‘instead of trying to run Europe. We’ve got enough damned Reds here without trying to stop the Reds over there. Let ’em look after themselves.’
‘I don’t think there’s a Red down in the yards,’ said Tim. ‘Except Red Ludwig, the feed man, and he makes you look like Joe Stalin. I didn’t think it was possible for a man to be so far to the right without falling off the edge of the world.’
‘Well, someone’s stirring up this trouble. Wanting seventy-five cents an hour as the minimum wage – if we give them that, there’ll be no end to their demands. You get that now, don’t you?’
‘Yes. But the minimum is forty cents an hour.’
‘Are you supporting the demand?’
‘They’re letting me stay neutral. The chaps appreciate my position. But there’s a lot of solidarity down there, Lucas. You won’t employ union labour, but these chaps are as solidly together as if they were a union.’
‘You sound as if you do support them.’
‘I told you, I’m neutral. But I’m leaning a little your way in telling you just how strong their feelings are. They’re not going to back down. I think you ought to meet with them.’
‘I’m not meeting with anyone. I’ve got fellers down there to run the company – I don’t believe in interfering.’
‘Nonsense,’ said Nina, who had been sitting quietly listening to their discussion. ‘I’ll bet you’ve already told management to say no to the men.’
‘A Red in my own family,’ said Lucas. ‘Emma Goldman.’
They were sitting on the enclosed back porch of the Davoren house. Tim and Lucas had played two sets of tennis on the court behind the main house, then they had come across for a beer. Even though they had played late in the afternoon, the July heat had been too much for Lucas and he was exhausted and testy. He was also very red, but in the circumstances of the discussion Nina diplomatically did not mention it. She placidly knitted, a pursuit she had taken up in the past month, telling Tim it would not only keep her occupied but would save them money on Michael’s clothes, a thriftiness which Tim, with a perfectly straight face which she hadn’t missed, said he appreciated. Occasionally she looked out towards the lawns where Michael was crawling around under the benevolent eye of George Biff. The nurse had been got rid of and George, without asking or being asked, had taken over.
‘You’re behaving like Grandfather.’
‘You don’t know how your grandfather behaved.’ Something more personal than the strike had made Lucas irritable. He had always fancied himself as a tennis player, but Tim, playing at only half-pace, had beaten him without the loss of a game.
‘I do know, Daddy. We had a teacher at Vassar who gave us a short course in labour history. Grandfather wasn’t quite as bad as Rockefeller and Henry Ford at breaking strikes, but he was bad enough. I was ashamed when the teacher told us what Grandfather did here in, I think it was 1924, some time then, when he locked out the railroad workers.’
‘Your teacher didn’t show much taste by mentioning that with you in his class.’
‘You don’t learn history by being squeamish. I knew he was trying to make me uncomfortable, he was that sort of man. But I checked and found out he was telling the truth.’
‘There are two sides to every dispute.’
‘Maybe you should go down to the yards and listen to the men’s side.’
Lucas, still red and sweating, wiped his face with his towel. He looked at his favourite, sensing, as he had for some time, that he was losing her day by day. He supposed this happened to all fathers when their daughters married; he wondered how Edith’s father had felt. A father’s rival was his son-in-law and all at once he felt a stab of jealousy towards Tim. He stood up, picked up his racquet and headed for the door with the abrupt departure that was an occasional characteristic of his, as if he had heard a whistle that called him to some other place.
‘Thanks for the game, Tim.’ The screen door banged behind him, a thudding first-act curtain.
‘That’s not the end of our argument with him,’ said Tim.
‘Do you think you should take a week off till all this blows over? We could go down to the plantation, you could do some fishing – ’
‘It’s not going to blow over in a week. The men are as stubborn as your father. And I think it would be cowardice for me to walk out before it was over.’
‘You’re not neutral, are you? You’re on their side.’
‘Do you mind?’
‘Not if you think they’re right. I just can’t imagine how people live on those sort of wages. They can’t live much better than those people I worked amongst in Germany.’
‘Oh, they live better than that. Nobody down at the yards is starving and they’ve all got a roof over their heads when they go home. But Bumper Cassidy told me, even with him and his wife working, they’ve never been out of debt in the fifteen years they’ve been married.’
‘Is he going on strike?’
‘He’s one of the leaders.’
She folded up her knitting, put it away in the expensive embroidered sewing bag that had cost her ten times the price of the wool she was knitting. ‘Don’t get involved, darling,’ she said and went out to Michael and George Biff, closing the screen door quietly behind her.
George picked up the baby, brushed the grass from him. ‘You stopped spoiling him, Miz Nina, he’s a good kid now.’
‘George, when did you become an expert on child raising?’
‘I had six brother and four sisters, all younger’n me. They started yowling, I belt ’em over the ear. They’s all grown up, nice people.’
‘But all deaf in one ear.’
He grinned, bounced Michael up and down in his arms. ‘Miz Nina, a little paddy-whacking never hurt nobody.’
‘If